Fear of Failure in Many Nights a Whisper

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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What’s left when we’ve moved on.

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In general, we play games to have fun. But more and more often, describing the feelings they provoke as “fun” makes no sense in context. Inscryption, Animal Well, Mouthwashing and many others are recent examples, but looking through games history we can see many more that have aimed to produce feelings as their first goal rather than provide a consumer experience. Of course, since games are played directly, they can sustain emotions that other forms of art might struggle to, like stress, frustration and disappointment.

Many Nights a Whisper is a new game that takes about an hour to finish. You live at a monastery in a world where wishes can come true if you complete a ritual. The ritual involves you hurling fire at a chalice across the ocean. In the day you train by hurling fire at farther and farther away chalices. In the night you listen to people’s wishes and cut their hair if you agree to grant them. You take the hair and braid it into your slingshot, making it more likely you’ll be able to reach the chalice on the appointed day.

The game asks you if you liked the routine or not. Did I? After a few days I got in the rhythm of training and lit every torch I could reach as practice. Then a few days later I was back to just practicing on the farthest-away targets. I roleplayed as someone serious about my goal. Aiming is frustrating at first; you have to line up your character’s arm with the target and guess, until you learn how the arc of the fireball works.

The game gets easier the more wishes you grant, excluding the last shot. Your character’s growth is represented by your slingshot’s distance, not just by you as a player getting better at shooting, which I appreciated. There is a point where you can just hit the nearby chalices without thinking too hard, but the far-away ones are always tough – there’s a limit to your skill, even when you have supernatural help.

After the day comes your nightly routine. I like the main character’s design; I actually think the drawn graphic of them on the store page is my favorite artistic part of the game. Unfortunately, their after-work reflections took me out of the story completely. They seemed more designed to be relatable to me (or a generic person in their 20s, rather) than reflective of someone who actually lives in this world.

On the other hand, the nighttime segments that follow were my favorite part. They communicate how this reality has done a quarter-degree turn from the similar-to-ours world it used to be. Every night townspeople dangle their hair in front of you and make a wish. If you cut the hair, the wish is granted – assuming you make the shot, of course. There are a variety of wishes, some completely unhinged. Others are made by people who don’t even seem to understand what wishing means. All these wishes are resting on your shoulders, up until the point when you put on the ceremonial robe and step up to the plate.

I did all this, and then I missed the shot. And this was where my emotional journey with the game began.

Many Nights a Whisper is about a permissive society. Everyone seems mostly inclusive, non-repressed and happy with their lives on the whole. Apart from monastic rules, which mostly relate to wishes, there’s not a lot you can’t do. And the game says to you, through your mentor, that things will be ok whether you make the shot or not.

However, this is a game about desire. Wishes are made and accepted to be granted. If they’re not, by definition, you failed.

And I felt the complete weight of that failure when I missed. I felt truly disappointed. I had a pit in my stomach when I saw that I overshot the chalice, and as I watched the ending cutscene that feeling turned to panic. The game doesn’t use save states; you have to replay the whole thing if you want to try again. An artistic statement, but also a sign that I’m never making that shot.

Not being able to save was integral to how bad I felt. In most games, you are expected to fail but your failure isn’t accounted for in the narrative. With a few exceptions – one of my favorite games, Pyre, for example – the game reloads and doesn’t acknowledge that you messed up. Such reloads are essential to complete the game. Even in arcade games, adding a quarter reverses time to the start.

Many Nights a Whisper isn’t truly different – you can start a new file – but its decision to not save emphasizes the pressure it wants you to feel when you’re taking the shot. We talk a lot about games being designed to provoke a reaction. It might be addiction. Maybe it’s anger. Often, it’s sadness. This game provoked stress from its first moments up until, and in my case after, the final shot. It’s tempting to say that games that cause us stress are doing so by accident; poor design, for example. Or, stress is for masochists who want to play hard games they can eventually overcome. This game might technically be hard, but it’s not the mechanics that make it that way, but the constraints you’re under to execute them.

Did I enjoy playing Many Nights a Whisper? In some moments yes, but when I look back on the experience it’s stress, not enjoyment, focus or achievement that defined my playthrough. This doesn’t mean the game failed; rather, it succeeded at a task many games are too scared to try. It made me feel bad. On the game’s part, it’s taking a risk that I’ll remember that feeling as a successful artistic gesture and not a cheat or an annoyance. All in all, I liked the game’s conceit more than the moment to moment of playing it, and I liked its setting much more than its dialogue. But what I liked the most is also what made me feel the worst: the pressure it put on me.

Besides the shot, I was most impacted by something you learn in the middle of a nighttime wish-fest; wishes alter the memory of reality, so those who achieve their wishes don’t realize anything was ever different. Despite seeming to take away the importance of the shot – if you succeed, no one will ever know – it made me appreciate how this strange society worked. Wishes have been overwriting other wishes for eternity, with me (the player) the only one in the world who would remember when things were different. As it turned out, my actions doomed the world to remember everything they wanted and know they were inches from having it. After some thought, I like my ending better. But the feeling of failure still lingers.

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Emily Price is a freelance writer, digital editor, and PhD candidate in literature based in Brooklyn, New York. You can find her on Bluesky.